Canonical question

[Augster99]

I have at least  three duplicate main pages on my website:

www.augustbullocklaw.com

www.augustbullocklaw.com/index

augustbullocklaw.com

I want the first one, www.augustbullocklaw.com to be the main page. I put this code on the index page and uploaded it to my site: http://www.augustbullocklaw.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" />

This code now appears on all three pages shown above. Did I do this correctly?

I surmise that www.augustbullocklaw.com is pointing to itself. Is that ok?

I don't know how to take the cononical code off the page that is the page I want to be the main page. (I don't know how to remove it from www.augustbullocklaw.com, but leave it on www.augustbullocklaw.com/index and augustbullocklaw.com)

Thanks

[Francisco_Meza]

This is an .htaccess issue. You want to point the non-www to the www. This is not a canonical issue.

[Augster99]

I can't understand that at all.

Are you (or someone) able to explain step by step what to do.

How exactly does one point the non-www to the www?

[Francisco_Meza]

301 redirects within .htaccess. I don't have a step by step because you can google it and get the code.

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi August,

You've made a small error; it looks like you've used the rel canonical example from here; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. The "canonical-version-of-page" there is supposed to be an example of a folder on the site and shouldn't be literal, so the code on your page should be:

Where the value inside the 'href' part is the URL to the page you wish to be the canonical version. I hope that makes sense!

What Francisco is suggesting is an alternative, and often preferred, method of handling this scenario, where a user trying to visit the other (non-canonical) versions of this URL would be redirected automatically by their browser to the canonical version. This does have some advantages but I'd say it isn't significant enough for you to worry about.

Best of luck!

[Augster99]

Thank you very much for that clear answer!